Top 35 Danya Kukafka Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You are a fingerprint. When you open your eyes on the last day of your life, you see your own thumb. In the jaundiced prison light, the lines on the pad of your thumb look like a dried-out riverbed, like sand washed into twirling patterns by water, once there and now gone.”

— Danya Kukafka

2. “On his wedding night, Russ thought of Lee Whitley in the way you think of someone dead. Fondly, too fondly, until absence takes this fondness and multiplies it, stretching until it becomes something invasive. Until it swallows you whole.”

— Danya Kukafka

3. “Lucinda was dead, and the reminder slapped him constantly, freezing ocean waves against his thighs. He could only wade deeper. Deeper, until the truth bubbled into his mouth, salty, miserable. Deeper, until it was pointless to search for shorelines because he knew Lucinda would not be standing on them.”

— Danya Kukafka

4. “It’s almost funny: you think you matter to someone. They’re the center of your universe, the sun you revolve around. You’d give anything for their details. You inch closer, closer, with tentative steps. You can walk as far as you want, but it won’t matter. You are not even on their map.”

— Danya Kukafka

5. “Every second is a year. Every second is your failure, every second is your lifeline. Every second goes to waste.”

— Danya Kukafka

6. “Felix Culpa, her mother had written. The happy fault. The horrible thing that leads to the good.”

— Danya Kukafka

7. “She glimpsed that same craving in Jenny Fisk – an ask, for suffering. It was the scariest thing about being a woman. It was hardwired, ageless, the part that knew you could have the good without the hurt, but it wouldn’t be nearly as exquisite.”

— Danya Kukafka

8. “You don’t need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.”

— Danya Kukafka

9. “There is good and there is evil, and the contradiction lives in everyone. The good is simply the stuff worth remembering. The good is the point of it all.”

— Danya Kukafka

10. “It was irresistible: the almost.”

— Danya Kukafka

11. “Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.”

— Danya Kukafka

12. “This was how it always went, wasn’t it? All those women who’d come before her, in caves and tents and covered wagons. It was a wonder how she’d never given much thought to the ancient, timeless fact. Motherhood was, by nature, a thing you did alone.”

— Danya Kukafka

13. “Lavender wanted to tell them what she had learned about demons. Often, they were not demons at all – only the jagged parts ofherself she’d hidden from the sun.”

— Danya Kukafka

14. “Saffy wondered about her own internal compass, the needle that kept her on this path, stopped her from wandering or regressing or giving up entirely. It scared her to realize there was no compass. There were only days and the choices she made within them.”

— Danya Kukafka

15. “Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Greif was a loneliness that felt like a planet.”

— Danya Kukafka

16. “Good and evil are simply stories that we tell ourselves, narratives we’ve created to justify being alive. No person is wholly good, and no person wholly evil.”

— Danya Kukafka

17. “Grief was a loneliness that felt like a planet.”

— Danya Kukafka

18. “She had known from a young age that everyone had darkness inside-some just controlled it better than others. Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.”

— Danya Kukafka

19. “It is possible, looking at the ocean, to believe it never ends.”

— Danya Kukafka

20. “Forgiveness is flimsy. Forgiveness is like a square of warm sun on the carpet. You’d like to curl up in it, feel it’s temporary comfort, but forgiveness will not change you. Forgiveness will not bring you back.”

— Danya Kukafka

21. “Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy.”

— Danya Kukafka

22. “Sister love was like food, or air, or memory itself. It was molecular. The very stuff of her.”

— Danya Kukafka

23. “Tragedy had a texture. A knot, begging to be unraveled.”

— Danya Kukafka

24. “A thousand miles away, justice is being served – but justice, Saffy thinks, is supposed to feel like more. Justice is supposed to be an anchor, an answer. She wonders how a concept like justice made it into the human psyche, how she ever believed that something so abstract could be labeled, meted out. Justice does not feel like compensation. It does not even feel like satisfaction.”

— Danya Kukafka

25. “The love between sisters was not the sort of thing she’d read about in books or swooned over in movies. It embodied a category all in itself, a quiet knowing that swam in her veins, even when Jenny was miles away. Sister love was like food, or air, or memory itself.”

— Danya Kukafka

26. “Sometimes you are certain this is all you are made of: a fleeting instant between action and inaction. Doing something, or not. Where is the difference, you wonder? Where is the choice. Where is the line, between stillness and motion?”

— Danya Kukafka

27. “There must have been a time, a reporter said to you once. A time before you were like this. If there ever was a time, you would like to remember it.”

— Danya Kukafka

28. “It was impossible to think about the lives she could have lived without thinking of those she could have saved. So Saffy decided not to consider them at all. From that moment forward, she would forget that tempting almost-world; there was only this, a brief and imperfect and singular reality. She would have to find a way to live it.”

— Danya Kukafka

29. “Lavender knew, then, that the world was a forgiving place. That every horror she had lived or caused could be balanced with such gutting kindness. It would be a tragedy, she thought – inhumane – if we were defined only by the things we left behind.”

— Danya Kukafka

30. “Give yourself a moment every day, Harmony had suggested once in group therapy. A single moment in which you are absolved of all responsibility. How much responsibility could a person hold, Lavender wondered. How much, before the overflow?”

— Danya Kukafka

31. “Just another bad man, his head hung morose as he pled with the jury. This job was getting to her. Not the bodies, or the missing children, or the rampant opioids. It was this. Men like Lawson, who believed their very existences afforded them lawlessness. Men who had been handed the world, trashed it, and still demanded more.”

— Danya Kukafka

32. “She wanted to be good, whatever that meant. As Saffy gazed up at the ceiling, hot tears burning down her cheeks, she prayed that the difference between good and evil was simply a matter of trying.”

— Danya Kukafka

33. “She had created two living beings. Eventually, they would be people. Lavender hoped that the mystery of their futures held exactly this: gritty sand, goose-bumped arms, waves breaking over their freckled shoulders. She remembered the bedroom window in the farmhouse, that tease of a breeze. They had it now. If nothing else, Lavender had given them the gift of possibility. Her boys could touch it with their hands, the wide expanse of the world.”

— Danya Kukafka

34. “A buzzing paranoia nipped at the edges of Saffy’s consciousness, a fly too subtle to swat.”

— Danya Kukafka

35. “In most of your memories, your mother is gone. And before she is gone, always, she is leaving.”

— Danya Kukafka

36. “We cannot be whole until we face what has broken us.”

— Danya Kukafka